Arion for 3ds Max

The finest rendering quality for 3ds max, GPU accelerated.

Arion for 3ds Max

Arion Renderer is a physically-based, unbiased and spectral rendering engine with state of the art GPU acceleration.

Arion for 3ds Max is a tight integration of Arion Renderer inside of 3ds Max interface and tools.

Fast learning curve, fast and beautiful renders are just three of its many great features.

Motion blur

Real motion blur is one of the features that make an engine deserve to be called production-ready. Efficient motion blur is simply mandatory for animation rendering.

Motion blur in Arion for 3ds Max is physically-correct and happens automatically, taking into account the camera shutter and the motion speed of the entities in the scene. It does not happen as a fake post-process effect, and it does not require multiple pass renders; it simply happens as naturally as Depth of Field does.

More examples:

Particle Flow &Forest Pack Pro

Memory conservation is one of the most important aspects in production rendering, cost-efficiency and render-farm management.

The state-of-the-art implementation of geometry instancing in Arion Renderer runs at an incredible speed on both the CPU and the GPU.

Network rendering

Arion for 3ds Max plug-in is sold with an UNLIMITED number of network rendering slaves to be used through Backburner®.

When the schedule is tight and adding computers to the network is the only solution, there's no need to worry about any licensing issues. Arion for 3ds Max will simply feed all the rendering nodes from a single master license.

Note that unlimited network rendering is exclusive to Arion for 3ds Max and is not available in the stand-alone version of Arion.

AOVs (compositing channels)

Arion's render passes have been improved and extended in Arion 2.0, giving more flexibility for shot compositing.

For example, we have added the new Roughness and Fresnel channels, which make it possible to tweak reflections in post-production.

Now it is also possible to define shadow catcher materials to render matte/shadow channels to better embed rendered objects into real-life footage or background photographs.

Displacement mapping

Sometimes it is required to add extra details to a surface that bump or normal mapping are unable to reproduce accurately. Then it is crucial for a production-proven render engine to support render-time micro-polygon displacement mapping.

Arion's approach to displacement mapping is very precise, it supports real curvature without cracking and works on the CPU and the GPU. Remarkably, it is evaluated in render-time, requiring no extra warm-up time or memory.

Features legend

Supported in Arion stand-alone

Supported in Arion for 3ds Max

Supported in Arion for Rhinoceros

*

The feature is supported by the core but cannot be generated from the product. The scene must be generated by a plug-in with full support of the feature.

Technology

Hybrid acceleration (GPU+CPU).

Optional CUDA-based Multi-GPU sub-core.

Optional Multi-processor / multi-core / multi-thread CPU sub-core.

Based on highly optimized and elegantly crafted code.

CPU SSE/SIMD support.

Spectral unbiased rendering

Unbiased and accurate physically-based light simulation.

The renderer explores all light paths, converging to the final image progressively.

Automatic Full Global Illumination.

Path tracing core.

Metropolis Light Transport core.

Physical atmosphere (Preetham and Hosek & Winkie models).

Image-Based Lighting (HDRI).

Mesh emitters.

Automatic camera optics and full motion blur.

Finite sampling per component.

BSDF output clamp.

Hair and fur rendering

Hair and fur render-time primitives.

Tubular primitive with root and tip controls.

Flat primitive with root and tip controls.

Customizable number of segments.

Highly efficient rendering on the GPU.

Works with standard Arion BSDF materials.

Works with SSS and Single-sheet SSS.

Physical camera simulation

True optics and reflex camera simulation.

Focal length.

Diaphragm aperture (f-stop).

Shutter speed.

ISO film.

Focal distance.

Film shift.

Barrel and pincushion lens distortion.

Film back size.

Panoramic cameras.

Orthogonal cameras.

Physical materials

Advanced multi-layered material creation system.

Opacity mapping.

Global or mapped roughness.

Fresnel and falloff controls.

Colored dielectric absorption.

Dielectric dispersion (chromatic aberration).

Bump/Normal mapping.

Per-map UVW and RGB modifiers.

Plastic coatings.

Sub-Surface Scattering.

Micro-Polygon Displacement Mapping.

Local exit color.

Displacement Mapping

No warm-up overhead implementation.

Memory-less render-time implementation.

Configurable micro-polygon density.

Waterlevel height (compatible with opacity mapping).

Configurable mid-point for compatibility with the most popular digital sculpting packages.

(World and camera space)(World and camera space)(random or custom colors)(random or custom colors)(Opaque or transparent modes)

Depth

Roughness

Fresnel

Coverage

Ambient occlusion

Matte floor

LightMixer channels (Ambient, sun and 8 custom layers)

No re-render needed, AOVs are rendered along with the beauty pass

Licensing system

Floating file-based (.lic) software licensing.

The .lic file is assigned to a user and is transportable (not node-locked).

The Arion plug-ins unlock an unlimited number of render slaves with just one master license.

Hardware acceleration

Support for all CUDA-enabled nVidia graphics cards.

CUDA acceleration in Arion is optional, and can be turned off if necessary.

Arion reverts to the CPU sub-core if no CUDA-enabled devices are found.

And more to come...

Arion for 3ds Max BETA

RandomControl gives its users to test drive the beta versions of Arion for 3ds Max for FREE. All you have to do is log-in to your Customer Account and download the latest beta version available.

Beta versions are unlimited and showcase the latest stable advancements in the Arion Renderer Technology.

WARNING: Beta software is what it is and may be unstable, have disabled or broken features etc Use at your own risk.

Hair and fur primitives

One of the blocks of the Arion v3 Core engine is the brand new support for hair primitives.

Arion for 3ds Max v3.0.0 supports hair in different ways. For example, the hair in this scene was generated with ephere’s Ornatrix plug-in, and then rendered in Arion.

Arion’s hair is extremely efficient, but it is also very high-quality. Our hair strands are not fake billboards or camera-oriented ribbons; they are actual tubular volumes.

Another remarkable property of our hair system is that it relies on the same BSDF that is used to model every other material in the Arion Core. This allows for great flexibility, and complex effects such as SSS, S5 and coatings are supported seamlessly.

Last, but not least, Arion’s hair system supports animation and motion blur.

Arion fur modifier

Arion v3.0.0 features a new modifier capable of taking an existing mesh and adding fur on top of it, based on Arion hair/fur system.

This new modifier is highly controllable and allows the user to set all sort of parameters such as the gravity pull, the flexibility of the fur fibers, their randomization, and density, … The real-time preview of the modifier reacts to all these parameters in the 3ds Max viewport.

With the Arion Fur modifier it is possible to easily create highly realistic and complex elements such as fields of grass, towels, or furry carpets.